Isegoria

The glow was red, like the inside of a red hot furnace

October 13th, 2024

When it came time to detonate the world’s first full-scale thermonuclear device, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), it was decided that six human pilots, all volunteers, would fly straight into the center of the radioactive stem and mushroom cloud:

Another group of pilots was assigned to fly along the outer edges of the predicted fallout zones. That group included Hervey Stockman, who, four years later, would become the first CIA pilot to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.

[…]

Given the extraordinary magnitude of the thermonuclear bomb, it is utterly remarkable to consider that shortly after Robinson flew his F-84G straight through its mushroom stem, he was able to radio back clear thoughts to his commanding officer, who was located twenty-five miles to the south, on Eniwetok. “The glow was red, like the inside of a red hot furnace,” the record states Robinson said. He then described how his radio instrument meters were spinning around in circles, “like the sweep second hand on a watch.” After going inside the cloud a second time, Robinson reported that his “airplane stalled out and gone [sic] into a spin.” His autopilot disengaged and his radio cut out, but the courageous pilot flew on as instructed. He flew around in circles and finally he flew back into and out of the mushroom stem and the lower part of its cloud—for nearly four more hours. Only when it was time for Robinson to refuel did he realize that the electromagnetic pulse from the thermonuclear bomb had ruined his control beacon. This meant that it was impossible for him to locate the fuel tanker.

Robinson radioed the control tower on Eniwetok for help. He was told to head back to the island immediately. “Approximately ninety-six miles north of the island, [Robinson] reported that he’d picked up a signal on Eniwetok,” according to the official record, declassified in 1986 but with Robinson’s name redacted. At that point, he was down to six hundred pounds of fuel. Bad weather kicked in; “rain squalls obstructed his views.” Robinson’s fuel gauge registered empty and then his engine flamed out. “When he was at 10,000 feet, Eniwetok tower thought he would make the runway, he had the island in sight,” wrote an Air Force investigator assigned to the case. But he couldn’t glide in because his aircraft was lined with lead to shield him from radiation. At five thousand feet and falling fast, Robinson reported he wasn’t going to make it and that he would have to bail out. Now Robinson faced the ultimate challenge. Atomic-sampling pilots wore lead-lined vests. How to land safely and get out fast? Fewer than three and a half miles from the tarmac at Eniwetok, at an altitude of between five hundred and eight hundred feet, Robinson’s aircraft flipped over and crashed into the sea. “Approximately one minute later [a] helicopter was over the spot,” the Air Force investigator wrote. But it was too late. All the helicopter pilot could find was “an oil slick, one glove, and several maps.” Robinson’s body and his airplane sank to the bottom of the sea like a stone. His body was never recovered, and his family would learn of his fate only in 2008, after repeated Freedom of Information Act requests were finally granted by the Air Force.

Back on Elugelab Island, the dust was settling after the airplane-hangar-size Mike bomb had exploded with an unfathomable yield of 10.4 megatons—nearly twice that of its predicted size. Elugelab was not an island anymore. The thermonuclear bomb had vaporized the entire landmass, sending eighty million tons of pulverized coral into the upper atmosphere to float around and rain down. One man observing the bomb with high-density goggles was EG& G weapons test engineer Al O’Donnell. He’d wired, armed, and fired the Ivy bomb from the control room on the USS Estes, which was parked forty miles out at sea. O’Donnell says that watching the Mike bomb explode was a terrifying experience. “It was one of the ones that was too big,” says the man who colleagues called the Triggerman for having wired 186 nuclear bombs. The nuclear fireball of the Ivy Mike bomb was three miles wide. In contrast, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a fireball that was a tenth of a mile wide. When the manned airplanes flew over ground zero after the Ivy Mike bomb went off, they were horrified to see the island was gone. Satellite photographs in 2011 show a black crater filled with lagoon water where the island of Elugelab once existed.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

Analysis of hair DNA identified giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest, and zebra as prey

October 12th, 2024

Researchers recently identified dietary prey species from hair compacted in the teeth of two Tsavo lions that lived during the 1890s in Kenya — the dreaded Man-Eaters of Tsavo:

Analysis of hair DNA identified giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest, and zebra as prey and also identified hair that originated from lion.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Manson was an unlikely candidate for a charismatic leader

October 11th, 2024

Manson was an unlikely candidate for a charismatic leader, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a father he never met, he’d known little but privation and suffering. Few would be naturally inclined to look up to him, and in the most literal sense, not many could: he was only five foot six.

Manson spent his earliest years in neglect. When he was still an infant, his mother would leave him to go on benders with her brother, during one of which the pair decided to rob a guy who looked wealthy. Within hours, they’d been arrested, and Manson’s mother was imprisoned for several years. He was eight when she was released, and they spent the next months with a succession of unreliable men in seamy locales, his mom racking up another arrest for grand larceny.

Eventually, she pursued a traveling salesman in Indianapolis, marrying him in 1943 and trying to cut back on her drinking. Manson, not yet nine, was already a truant, known to steal from local shops. His mother looked for a foster home for him. Instead, he was made a ward of the state and sent to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic-run school for delinquents in Terre Haute, Indiana. He ran away. His mother took him back. The separation must have weighed on him, at least to go by his acolyte Watson, who later wrote that Manson had “a special hatred for women as mothers… This probably had something to do with his feelings about his own mother, though he never talked about her… The closest he came to breaking his silence was in some of his song lyrics: ‘I am a mechanical boy, I am my mother’s boy.’”

The “mechanical boy” made short work of the Gibault School. Ten months in, he ran away again, turning to burglary to keep himself afloat. His crimes soon landed him in a correctional facility in Omaha, Nebraska. He ran away from there, too, and started breaking into grocery stores. At age thirteen, Manson was sent to the Indiana Boys School, a tougher institution, where he claimed the other boys raped him. He learned to feign lunacy to keep them at bay. And he kept running away: eighteen times in three years.

In February 1951, when he was sixteen, Manson broke out again, this time with a pair of other boys. They drove a stolen car across state lines—a federal offense. When a roadblock in Utah brought their escapade to an end, Manson was sent to the National Training School for Boys, in Washington, D.C. Thus began a long stint in the federal reformatory system. From there, Manson went to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where he was caught raping a boy at knifepoint; to a federal reformatory in Virginia, where he racked up similar offenses; and to a reformatory in Ohio, where a run of good behavior earned him an early release in 1954, though caseworkers had taken frequent note of his antisocial behavior and psychic trauma.

In less than a year’s time he had a wife, and a baby on the way. He took on various service jobs, but he couldn’t give up stealing cars, several of which he drove, again, across state lines. Those crimes, plus his failure to attend a hearing related to one of them, netted him a three-year sentence to Terminal Island, a federal prison in San Pedro, California. By the time he got out, in 1958, his wife had filed for divorce, and he turned to pimping to make a living. The following May, he was arrested yet again, this time for forging a government check for $37.50. This got him another ten-year sentence, but the judge, moved by the plea of a woman who said she was in love with him and wanted to marry him, suspended the sentence right away, letting him go free.

Manson kept pimping, stealing cars, and scheming people out of their money. The FBI was surveilling him, hoping to bust him for violating the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of prostitutes across state lines. They were never able to bring the charge, but when Manson disappeared to Mexico with another prostitute, he was found in violation of his probation, and the ten-year sentence he’d received earlier was brought into effect. The same judge who’d granted him probation now decreed: “If there ever was a man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for probation, he is it.”

Stuck in prison for the long haul, Manson took up the guitar and dabbled in Scientology. The staff noted his gift for charismatic storytelling and his enduring “personality problems.” He made no secret of his musical aspirations. From behind bars, he observed, with great interest and envy, the meteoric rise of the Beatles.

When he was released at age thirty-two, he’d spent more than half his life in the care of the state. He preferred life in prison, he said, so much so that he asked if he could simply remain inside. “He has no plans for release,” one report said, “as he says he has nowhere to go.”

Maybe we should let people stay in prison longer.

Posted in Crime | 7 Comments »

The K Company commander ordered his men to let the tanks pass down the road unmolested

October 10th, 2024

Kulak’s recent review of Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon: An Interactive Exercise in Small-Unit Tactics and Leadership, mentions that the author, John F. Antal, based the scenario on a real battle from World War 2:

So the twist Antal reveals at the end is that everything about this happening during a fictional future war in the middle east? That was fake.

This was a real battle, it all happened, the overwhelming force, etc. In World War 2.

He changed a bunch, there were no overflying F-18s and helicopters in WW2, but the core tactical scenario, the overwhelming odds and the decisions that had to be made just right by the junior officers for it to actually work… All of that was basically real to a battle that happened in 1940s North Africa.

The very first decision of a forward slope defense vs. ambush in paths, vs. reverse slope defense? That was a decision faced there in 1940s North Africa and did make all the difference.

I didn’t follow the optimal path through the book, so I didn’t reach Section 98:

During World War II the infantry often found itself facing attacks by heavy armored forces. A month after the disastrous rout of U.S. forces at Kasserine Pass, the infantrymen of Patton’s III Corps were spoiling for a rematch. They got their chance on March 24, 1943. K Company of 3d Battalion, 18th Infantry, defended the hills east of El Guettar and demonstrated to the vaunted Afrika Korps what a platoon of determined infantrymen could do.

El Guettar was a typical date-palm oasis in the Tunisian desert. Steep, rocky hills covered the major routes of advance into the area. Elsewhere the valley floor was crisscrossed with deep wadis. On March 24, 1943, K Company was deployed as the right flank of 3d Battalion and controlled the main road through its defensive sector. The commander of K Company was ordered that, if attacked, he was to block the enemy and defend until armored forces could arrive.

The company deployed with 1st Platoon in a reverse-slope defense on a ridgeline that ran down toward the road. The 2d and 3d Platoons were located on the counterslope to the rear. There was a wadi on the reverse slope about fifteen meters below and parallel to the crest of the ridgeline.

1st Platoon moved into position on March 22 and prepared positions behind the ridge. Browning .30-caliber light machine guns and grenadiers were positioned on each flank. Squad machine guns — Browning automatic rifles (BARs) — were posted to cover the crest of the ridge to plaster anyone coming over the top. A two-man observation post was established five hundred meters forward of the company line.

Once it got dark the platoon moved to the top of the ridge and occupied positions on the forward slope to defend against enemy infiltration. By midnight the defense was ready. At 0600 the observation post alerted 1st Platoon of the approach of a German tank column. Since no supporting infantry was observed with the advancing tanks, the K Company commander ordered his men to let the tanks pass down the road unmolested.

Thirty minutes later the observation post reported a line of half-tracks approaching from the east. German mechanized infantry would soon be opposing 1st Platoon. The platoon immediately moved to its reverse-slope defensive positions. The Germans moved short of the ridge, dismounted their infantry from their half-tracks, and assaulted the crest. The fire from the Americans was so effective that the enemy was unable to take the crest, in spite of repeated attempts. The Germans, determined to take the ridge and drive off the Americans, continued the attack all day.

Eight hours later 1st Platoon still stubbornly held its position on the reverse slope. The enemy finally launched a dismounted attack around the left flank but was hammered back by the deadly fire of the platoon’s Browning light machine guns. By 1700 the battle was over and the Germans withdrew, leaving behind five hundred dead and wounded and five destroyed half-tracks. 1st Platoon, K Company, 3d Battalion, 18th Infantry, lost one dead and seven wounded.

This example illustrates the importance of preparation, security, and the intelligent use of terrain to conduct a defense with light infantry against an armored opponent. The positioning of the platoon’s key weapons and the flexibility of the defense to respond to different threats (day versus night positions) was a critical ingredient for their success. The platoon’s use of concentrated fires, delivered from positions that were undetected on the reverse slope of the ridge, surprised the enemy and disrupted his combined-arms synchronization.

In the real-life battle, they let the tanks pass down the road unmolested? How did that work?

Well, according to Wikipedia, the German attack lost momentum when it ran into a minefield:

When the Germans slowed to reorganize, U.S. artillery and anti-tank guns engaged, including 31 M10 tank destroyers which had recently arrived. Over the next hour, 30 of the 10th Panzer’s tanks were destroyed, and by 09:00 they retreated from the valley.

That’s not what I had in mind when ordered to block an armored column with a platoon of light infantry.

Posted in War | No Comments »

These controllers are inherently familiar to the next generation of potential warfighters before they ever even sign up to serve

October 9th, 2024

American troops will direct future war machines with familiar controllers:

Over the past several years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what appear to be variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the primary control units for a variety of advanced weapons systems, according to publicly available imagery published to the department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

Produced since 2008 by Measurement Systems Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British defense contractor Ultra that specializes in human-machine interfaces, the FMCU offers a similar form factor to the standard Xbox or PlayStation controller but with a ruggedized design intended to safeguard its sensitive electronics against whatever hostile environs American service members may find themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks used on various US naval systems and aircraft, MSI has served as a subcontractor to major defense “primes” like General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems to provide the handheld control units for “various aircraft and vehicle programs,” according to information compiled by federal contracting software GovTribe.

[…]

The endlessly customizable FMCU isn’t totally new technology: According to Ultra, the system has been in use since at least 2010 to operate the now-sundowned Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned autonomous helicopter and the Ground Based Operational Surveillance System (GBOSS) that the Army and Marine Corps have both employed throughout the global war on terror. But the recent proliferation of the handset across sophisticated new weapon platforms reflects a growing trend in the US military towards controls that aren’t just uniquely tactile or ergonomic in their operation, but inherently familiar to the next generation of potential warfighters before they ever even sign up to serve.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

So it is with all nations, big or small

October 8th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World came out in 2015 and was revised in 2016. It opens with this introduction:

Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: “Why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine?”

If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west. So it is with all nations, big or small. The landscape imprisons their leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to maneuver than you might think.

Later he devotes a whole chapter to Russia:

When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends “but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, “I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.”

[…]

Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing toward Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia’s borders it is more than two thousand miles wide, and is flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941.

Likewise, in the Russian Far East it is geography that protects Russia. It is difficult to move an army from Asia up into Asian Russia; there’s not much to attack except for snow and you could get only as far as the Urals. You would then end up holding a massive piece of territory, in difficult conditions, with long supply lines and the ever-present risk of a counterattack.

You might think that no one is intent on invading Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past five hundred years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans—twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–56 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied the territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR, as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian empire. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defense of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe—under Russian leadership—formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defense and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight, by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust.

President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the breakup of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as a “major geopolitical disaster of the century.”

Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia in 2004; and Albania in 2009. NATO says no such assurances were given.

Russia, like all great powers, is thinking in terms of the next one hundred years and understands that in that time anything could happen. A century ago, who could have guessed that American armed forces would be stationed a few hundred miles from Moscow in Poland and the Baltic States? By 2004, just fifteen years after 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia was in NATO or the European Union.

The Moscow administration’s mind has been concentrated by that, and by Russia’s history.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

The vessel is the first New Zealand naval vessel to be unintentionally sunk since World War II and the first to be lost in peacetime

October 7th, 2024

In December 2022, Commander Yvonne Gray took the command of HMNZS Manawanui:

Gray, originally an officer in the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, moved to New Zealand in 2012. In 2024 the vessel carried out three deployments to the South West Pacific, including visits to Kermadec Islands, Samoa, Tokelau and Niue. In its final deployment the vessel sailed from Devonport on 28 September, intending to return to port on 1 November.

On the evening of 5 October 2024, the ship ran aground around one nautical mile (1.9 km; 1.2 mi) off Siumu, on the south coast of Upolu island, Samoa, whilst carrying out survey work to a reef in rough seas and high winds. Commander Yvonne Gray gave the order to abandon the ship.

On the evening of 5 October 2024, the ship ran aground around one nautical mile (1.9 km; 1.2 mi) off Siumu, on the south coast of Upolu island, Samoa, whilst carrying out survey work to a reef in rough seas and high winds. Commander Yvonne Gray gave the order to abandon the ship.

Rescue efforts were managed by the New Zealand Rescue Coordination Centre and the Royal New Zealand Air Force deployed a P-8A Poseidon aircraft to assist. The evacuation began at 7:52 pm on 5 October.

Due to challenging weather conditions it took five hours for the lifeboats to reach the shore. One of the rescue boats flipped over during the journey and its occupants walked to shore on the reef.

The vessel caught fire by 6:40 am on 6 October and capsized and sank by 9:00 am.

At least 17 people were injured in the incident, many from cuts and abrasions from walking on the reef, and three received hospital treatment, including one for a dislocated shoulder.

[…]

The vessel is the first New Zealand naval vessel to be unintentionally sunk since World War II and the first to be lost in peacetime.

Posted in War | 9 Comments »

Soldiers, remember it is my custom to bivouac on the field of battle!

October 7th, 2024

Andrew Roberts describes (in Napoleon: A Life) the hard fought Battle of Marengo:

The French refused to abandon the Fontanone line when the Austrians counter-attacked; soldiers urinated on muskets that had become too hot to handle from the constant firing.

[…]

‘Bonaparte advanced in front,’ recalled Petit, ‘and exhorted to courage and firmness all the corps he met with; it was visible that his presence reanimated them.’

At this point the Austrian Archduke Joseph, Archduke Charles’s younger brother, crossed the Fontanone with his infantry – the sides were too steep for cavalry or artillery. The French failed to dislodge him and his men started building a trestle bridge, covered by artillery firing canister shot which flayed the French brigade sent to stop them. By 2 p.m. Marengo had fallen: the Austrians had brought eighty guns into play, the Fontanone was being crossed everywhere and Gardanne’s division was broken, fleeing the field, though not before it had bought Napoleon 3 ½ hours’ respite with which to organize his counter-attack. Only Kellermann’s cavalry brigade, carefully retiring squadron by squadron, intimidated the Austrians from releasing their numerically superior cavalry force.

[…]

By this point the Austrians were taunting the French, twirling the bearskins of dead French grenadiers around on their sabres.

[…]

Napoleon, who now had only Monnier’s division and the Consular Guard in reserve, had sent desperate word to Desaix at 11 a.m. to return with Boudet’s division as quickly as possible. ‘I had thought to attack the enemy, instead it is he who has attacked me,’ went his message; ‘in the name of God, come back if you still can!’

[…]

The French moved backwards in good order, one battalion at a time, fighting as they went. It was an utter test of discipline not to succumb to the temptation to break ranks under those circumstances, and it paid off. The day continued very hot, with no water, little artillery support, and sustained attacks from the Austrian cavalry, but some units retreated steadily from 9.30 a.m. to about 4 p.m. over 5 miles, never breaking ranks.

Napoleon calmly called out encouragement and exuded leadership ‘with his accustomed sangfroid’, in the words of one of his guards, ensuring that his infantry, cavalry and paltry artillery each supported one another.

‘The Consul seemed to brave death,’ recalled Petit, ‘and to be near it, for the bullets were seen more than once to drive up the ground between his horse’s legs.’

He had now completely used up his reserves, had barely 6,000 infantry across a 5-mile front, with 1,000 cavalry and only 6 usable guns, and his army was exhausted, desperately thirsty, low on ammunition and one-third hors de combat, but he behaved as if victory were certain.

He even managed to be light-hearted; noticing that the horse Marbot was riding was slightly wounded in the leg, he ‘took me by the ear and said, laughing, “You expect me to lend you my horses for you to treat them in this way?”

[…]

‘We have gone back far enough today,’ Napoleon harangued his men. ‘Soldiers, remember it is my custom to bivouac on the field of battle!’

[…]

When the Austrians came forward at 5 p.m., the front of their centre regiments were ripped apart by canister fire from Marmont’s battery. As at Rivoli, a lucky shot hit an ammunition wagon that exploded and caused chaos. The Austrians recoiled sharply and the shock effect was serious, especially once Boudet’s division advanced upon them. Aggressive Austrian charges soon threw Boudet on the defensive, but just as nearly 6,000 Austrian infantry fired a musket volley and then charged with their bayonets, Kellermann unleashed his cavalry, which had moved up concealed by vines in the trees.

[…]

The French army then advanced across the whole front. It was at this triumphant moment that Desaix was struck in the chest and killed. ‘Why am I not allowed to weep?’ a grief-stricken Napoleon said on being told the news, but he had to concentrate on directing the next assault.

Kellermann’s next attacks sent Austrian cavalry charging back into their own infantry, completely disorganizing them and giving Lannes, Monnier and the Consular Guard the chance to complete the victory by moving forward on all fronts. ‘The fate of a battle is the result of a single instant – a thought,’ Napoleon was later to say about Marengo. ‘The decisive moment comes, a moral spark is lit, and the smallest reserve accomplishes victory.’

Austrian troops who had fought bravely all day simply cracked under the shock and strain of seeing victory snatched from them, and fled back to Alessandria in disorder.

[…]

When the news of Marengo reached Paris, government bonds that had been standing at 11 francs six months earlier, and 29 just before the battle, shot up to 35 francs.

[…]

Napoleon had worked his three arms of infantry, artillery and cavalry together perfectly at Marengo, but it was still a very lucky victory, won largely by the shock value of Desaix’s arrival on the field at precisely the right psychological moment, and Kellermann’s superbly timed cavalry charges. The French reconquered a plain in one hour that it had taken the Austrians eight to occupy. The conscript French troops, guided by the veterans, had acquitted themselves very well.

‘After a great battle,’ wrote Captain Blaze, ‘there is plenty of food for the crows and the bulletin-writers.’

Napoleon had made three major errors: in going onto the plain in the first place, in not anticipating Melas’s attack and in sending Desaix so far away.

[…]

Napoleon also invented some last words for Desaix: ‘Go tell the First Consul that I die with the regret of having not done enough to live in posterity.’ (In fact he had died instantaneously.)

[…]

The view of Desaix’s aide-de-camp Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary was that ‘If General Desaix had delayed an hour in arriving, we’d have been driven into the Po.’

The day after the battle, Napoleon wrote to the other consuls that he was ‘in the deepest pain over the death of the man I loved and respected the most’.

He took Savary and Desaix’s other aide-de-camp, Jean Rapp, onto his staff as a sign of respect, and he allowed the 9th Légère, which Desaix had been leading when he was killed, to sew the word ‘Incomparable’ in gold onto their standard.

He had Desaix’s corpse embalmed, and a medal struck in his honour, as well as one commemorating Marengo.

All that he said to Kellermann after the battle was, ‘You made a pretty good charge,’ which infuriated him, especially as he had gushed to Bessières, ‘The Guard cavalry covered itself with glory today.’

(Kellermann is supposed to have replied in anger, ‘I’m glad you are satisfied, general, for it has placed the crown on your head’, but it is doubtful that he really did.

Privately, Napoleon admitted to Bourrienne that Kellermann had ‘made a lucky charge. He did it just at the right moment. We are much indebted to him. You see what trifling circumstances decide these affairs.’

[…]

Perhaps the best summing up of the battle was Napoleon’s terse statement to Brune and Dumas: ‘You see, there were two battles on the same day; I lost the first; I gained the second.’

[…]

On June 16 Napoleon offered Emperor Francis peace once again, on the same basis as Campo Formio, writing: ‘I exhort Your Majesty to listen to the cry of humanity.’ In his Order of the Day he claimed the Austrians had recognized ‘that we are only fighting each other so that the English can sell their sugar and coffee at a higher price’.

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

The Dictator’s Dream

October 5th, 2024

John Antal composed a nightmare scenario for the US military, The Dictator’s Dream:

A world away, the war in Gaza continued unabated, and after suffering nearly 6,000 Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks in northern Israel, the Middle East had exploded. Israel launched a full-scale invasion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah forces north of the Litani River. Reacting swiftly, Hezbollah launched thousands of missiles towards Israel. A day later, Iran and its surrogates in Yemen launched massive rocket, missile, and drone attacks aimed at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and other Israeli cities and settlements.

Israel’s Iron Dome could not handle the overwhelming attack, and as a result, Israeli casualties dramatically mounted, and towns and villages burned. Hoping to avoid a war prior to the Presidential election, the United States first hesitated and then finally committed military forces to support their Jewish allies. In a massive movement of combat power, the United States military engaged with significant naval and air forces against Iran and its proxies. Consequently, Iran and its surrogates targeted American forces in the Middle East. The United States was now in a shooting war and taking casualties.

[…]

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russian forces were attacking relentlessly, regardless of their horrendous losses in men and equipment. The Ukrainians were fighting bravely, desperately, but the weight of the Russian attacks forced a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defenses. Ukrainian forces fell back in disorder and a mass refugee exodus from Ukraine began. The US and NATO rushed to respond with an emergency resupply operation, but it was proving to be too little, too late. With mounting Ukrainian losses in both manpower and territory, the dictator expected Kyiv to surrender to a triumphant Russia despite American efforts.

As the Americans were contending with a war in the Middle East and a faltering Ukraine, they were experiencing chaos at home. The contentious Presidential election erupted in violence. On November 7, when the winner of the election was announced, riots broke out in major American cities. The dictator’s hybrid warfare forces, already surreptitiously positioned in the US, facilitated, and supported these riots. Sabotage and violent “false flag” killings raged in cities across the US. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries were attacked by explosive laden drones. Forest fires raged across the American southwest, started by the dictator’s hybrid special forces teams and facilitated by drug cartel gangs. America’s national, military, and police forces struggled to maintain order. Sabotage, mass shootings, transportation disruptions, internet and communications outages, and attacks on the electrical grid, along with cyber-attacks from “unknown actors,” disrupted American society. Just in time logistics broke down. Store shelves were soon bare, and looting was rampant. Several major metropolises plunged into darkness. Disorder consumed America at home and abroad.

As this hybrid war played out in the United States, the dictator decided it was time to act against the renegade province that he had sworn to bring to heel. Rather than an outright invasion, his plan was more subtle, involving a siege and an ultimatum for a “peaceful” surrender. First, his military forces imposed a naval blockade, having practiced it multiple times in the prior 18 months during massive “punishment drills.” To increase the seriousness of this blockade, the dictator’s naval and air forces deployed sea mines to block the major trade routes. The dictator then ratcheted up the pressure by imposing a naval quarantine. This included halting, boarding, and detouring every ship sailing into the quarantine zone to the mainland for confiscation. The dictator dared any foreign power to challenge these actions and declared that his air, sea, and rocket forces would only respond with force if provoked.

You can also listen to Antal read the story and discuss it:

“Useful fiction” presents possible scenarios intended to develop creativity and strengthen foresight — solving problems in the short term and creating solutions for the long-run.
The increasing speed of battlefield adaptation requires the U.S. Army to innovate and develop courses of action very rapidly.
American deterrence has been dramatically affected by events in the past several years.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969

October 4th, 2024

After the Sharon Tate murder, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), it wasn’t over:

The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened, with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from the suburbs of Los Angeles who’d played the sousaphone in junior high.

And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.

The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife. Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately — and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in through an unlocked side door, and he tied up the couple by himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway, where they were waiting in the car.

Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill everyone. They had only buck knives.

They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator — misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.

[…]

But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months.

[…]

As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of LAPD detectives — one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca — failed to share information, believing the crimes unconnected.

[…]

Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.

[…]

[Susan] Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder — that of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson — and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.

[…]

These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.

They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor — bright buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts.

They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.

In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals — even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared — it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.

Posted in Crime | No Comments »

You will usually find that the enemy has three courses of action open to him

October 3rd, 2024

Kulak’s recent review of Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon: An Interactive Exercise in Small-Unit Tactics and Leadership, by John F. Antal, intrigued me enough to pick up a (digital) copy. The scenario puts you (as Lieutenant Davis) at the western mouth of Wadi Al Sirree, with the mission to block enemy forces from passing through, with three options:

A forward defense was the simplest option. If the enemy tried to attack through Wadi Al Sirree, he would have to fight through Davis’s men first. It would require the preparation of a platoon battle position east of the tank ditch to deny the enemy access into the trails. He would have to improve their present fighting positions and antitank ditch with mines and wire, thus blocking the enemy’s advance into the valley. This option would maximize simplicity, mass, and unity of command. Sometimes the simplest plan was the best one.

Davis’s second option was a reverse-slope defense at the eastern edge of the four trails that led into the valley. This course of action called for the entire platoon to reposition to the east, abandoning the hill that overlooked the tank ditch. A reverse-slope defense would deny the platoon clear observation of the enemy as he approached the valley, but it would provide better protection from enemy direct and indirect fires. The concept was to allow the enemy to breach the tank ditch and mines, place obstacles to force the enemy to move along the narrow northern trails, and then destroy the enemy at close range as he entered the valley. This course of action maximized security and economy of force.

The third option was to block the enemy in each of the four trails that led into Wadi Al Sirree. Davis knew that he had more short-range weapons than long-range weapons. He could divide the platoon into antiarmor ambush teams and assign each team a trail that led into the valley. The platoon could engage the attacker’s lead vehicles in selected short-range combat areas along each trail. By fighting a close-range battle in the trails that led into the valley, the platoon could pick off the enemy one at a time. The enemy wouldn’t see the defenders until it was too late. This option would maximize surprise and offensive action.

The author, Antal, also includes this amusing quote:

”You will usually find that the enemy has three courses of action open to him, and of these he will adopt a fourth.”

— Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

You don’t have long to decide:

”Thus decisive action remains the first prerequisite for success in war. Everybody, from the highest commander to the youngest soldiers, must be conscious of the fact that inactivity and lost opportunities weigh heavier than do errors in the choice of means.”
— Truppenfuhrung, German Field Service Regulations, 1933

Posted in War | 5 Comments »

She had never been required to read an entire book

October 2nd, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Columbia University’s required great-books course, Literature Humanities, since 1998, and he loves the job, but it has changed:

Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Posted in Education | 7 Comments »

Those numbers sound big — but they were insufficient to keep up with demand

October 1st, 2024

As recently as 2010, a small town in central Michigan was the world’s biggest producer of solar polysilicon, but now more than 90% comes from China:

Washington blames China’s dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed “unfair trade practices.” But that’s just a comforting myth. China’s edge doesn’t come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn’t been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it’s come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry — exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse.

[…]

Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. produces about one-third of the world’s chip-grade polysilicon, which finds its way into almost every electronic device on the planet. Solar polysilicon is simply the poor cousin of the stuff computer chips are made from: While impurities of one part in 100 million are considered acceptable for solar panels, microprocessors need to be pure to as much as one part in 10 trillion.

[…]

Dow had established itself in the 1890s in nearby Midland to take advantage of rich underground deposits of brine that could be refined into useful chemicals. The trains rattling back and forth there upset the delicate polysilicon purification process, so a new plant was established on isolated farmland in Hemlock, 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) to the south.

[…]

Things started to change around the year 2000, as rising concerns about climate change coincided with a surge in oil prices and the prospect of subsidies for renewables. Solar panels were traditionally so costly they were only used for highly specialized applications such as space probes, as well as watches and pocket calculators that only sip power. Suddenly in the early 2000s, solar started to look like a competitive way of producing energy.

As a result, PV-grade polysilicon — made until then from material rejected by chipmakers — seemed like it might become a valuable commodity in its own right. Almost overnight, it went from a backwater to a boom industry. The growth has yet to stop. Since 2005, annual installations of solar panels have increased at an average annual rate of about 44%. This year, the capacity of new modules installed globally every three days is roughly equivalent to what existed in the entire world at the end of 2005.

Hemlock initially surfed this wave. In 2005, it announced a $400 million to $500 million plan to increase production at the plant by half. Eighteen months later, it promised $1 billion more to add a further 90%. One more billion was announced amid the 2008 financial crisis, along with yet another $1.2 billion for a separate plant in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Those numbers sound big — but they were insufficient to keep up with demand.

There are a few reasons for that. First, Hemlock was owned by a joint venture between two American and two Japanese chemical companies, which between them produce everything from fiber optic cables to smartphone glass, plastics to insecticides, pill casings to machine tools and gold bullion. Such setups are notorious for complexity, which can undermine their ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions. Any fresh spending needed to get signed off by four corporate boards, none of whom saw solar poly as a priority.

Making matters worse was the fact that, when solar power started to take off in the late 1990s, Hemlock’s main shareholder Dow Corning was in the middle of a decade of bankruptcy protection — the result of lawsuits from women who claimed to have been harmed by its silicone breast implants.

Another factor was energy. As much of 40% of the cost of producing polysilicon is power, and the Hemlock factory is the biggest single-site consumer of electricity in Michigan — a remarkable statistic, when you consider the state also includes the immense General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. factories in Detroit.

Local electricity costs are relatively high. The 2008 expansion in Hemlock only went ahead after the state’s governor Jennifer Granholm — now President Biden’s secretary of energy — signed a bill giving the facility tax credits to protect it from electricity price hikes.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | 3 Comments »

No one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal

September 30th, 2024

Andrew Roberts summarizes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s first few months in power:

In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.

‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders… I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’ Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.

He had ordered the covert formation of a 30,000-strong Army of the Reserve based at Dijon on January 7, 1800:

He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal. Although Napoleon wouldn’t be travelling with elephants, he did have Gribeauval 8-pounder and 4-pounder cannon, whose barrels weighed over a quarter of a ton, to heave over the mountain range. Snow was still thick on the ground in early May, when the advance began, so Marmont devised sledges for the barrels made out of hollowed-out tree-trunks, which one hundred men at a time hauled up the Alps and then down again, to drumbeats. (Since the Italian side is much steeper than the French, they found it harder going down than up.)

Money and supplies were sent ahead to the monasteries and hostelries along the route, and local guides were hired and sworn to secrecy.

[…]

‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.

[…]

In the strategy meeting he allegedly asked Bourrienne where he thought the decisive battle would be fought. ‘How the devil should I know?’ answered his Brienne-educated private secretary. ‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps. It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.

[…]

In all 51,400 men crossed the Alps, with 10,000 horses and 750 mules. They went by single file in some places, and had to start at dawn every day to reduce the risk of avalanches once the sun had risen.

[…]

Napoleon rode a horse for almost the whole journey over the Alps, and a mule (as it was more sure of foot) for the iciest stretch around Saint-Pierre.

[…]

It was at this stage of the campaign that the sheer ruthlessness that helped make Napoleon so formidable a commander revealed itself once again. Instead of marching south to relieve starving Genoa, as his troops and even his senior commanders assumed he would do, he wheeled eastwards towards Milan to seize the huge supply depot there and cut off Melas’s line of retreat towards the Mincio river and Mantua. Ordering Masséna to hold out for as long as possible so that he would tie down Ott’s besieging force, Napoleon outfoxed Melas, who had taken it for granted that Napoleon would try to save Genoa. He had therefore left Nice and marched back from Turin to Alessandria to try to head Napoleon off.

[…]

At 6.30 p.m. that same day Napoleon entered Milan by the Verceil Gate in the pouring rain and installed himself at the archducal palace, staying up until 2 a.m. dictating letters, receiving Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who had run the Cisalpine Republic, setting up a new city government and releasing political prisoners interned by the Austrians, who had used Milan as their regional headquarters. He also read Melas’s captured despatches from Vienna, which told him the enemy’s strengths, dispositions and state of morale.

[…]

Genoa surrendered on June 4, by which time around 30,000 of its 160,000 inhabitants had died of starvation and of diseases associated with malnutrition, as had 4,000 French soldiers. Another 4,000 soldiers who were fit enough to march out were allowed to return to France with the honours of war, and a further 4,000 sick and wounded were transported to France in Royal Navy ships under Admiral Lord Keith, who had blockaded the port but saw the advantage of evacuating so many French away from the theatre of war.

Masséna’s health was broken, not least because he had insisted on only eating what his troops did. He never wholly forgave Napoleon for not rescuing him. Equally, Napoleon – who was never besieged in the whole of his career – criticized Masséna for not having held out for ten days longer, recalling when in exile on St Helena, ‘A few old men and some women might have died of hunger, but then he would not have surrendered Genoa. If one thinks always of humanity – only of humanity – one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan.’